The Deadhouse

The Deadhouse is the fourth novel in Linda Fairstein’s long running Alexandra Cooper series, the legal procedural mystery series she launched in 1996. Fairstein worked for decades as a sex crimes prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, eventually heading the unit, and the authority of her professional background runs through every book in the series. Alex Cooper is a fictionalized version of the kind of prosecutor Fairstein was, working out of the same Manhattan offices and dealing with the same kinds of cases.

The Deadhouse, published in 2001, is set on Roosevelt Island, the long thin strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. The island has a remarkable history that Fairstein clearly enjoyed researching. It was once home to a smallpox hospital, a lunatic asylum, and the deadhouse of the title, the morgue used by the various nineteenth century institutions on the island. When a Columbia University professor falls to her death from one of the abandoned buildings, Alex and her detective partners Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace get pulled into a case that turns out to be tangled up with academic politics, a long buried scandal, and the strange forgotten history of the place itself.

Fairstein’s strength as a mystery writer is the historical and architectural texture she gives her settings. Each Alex Cooper novel takes a particular New York landmark or institution and uses it as the spine of the story. The reader finishes the book having learned something real about the city alongside the murder plot. The Deadhouse is one of the stronger early entries in this regard, since Roosevelt Island’s history is genuinely strange and Fairstein knows how to make it accessible.

Readers who enjoy Patricia Cornwell, Karin Slaughter, or Sue Grafton’s classic Kinsey Millhone novels will find familiar pleasure here.